The Desert of Arizona
Partly Cloudy 60 Degrees
You might think that customizing your services for clients would be a good thing. Who doesn’t want that?
Well, as it turns out, a lot of human beings don’t want that.
They probably don’t even KNOW they don’t want that, but their actions don’t really lie.
Imagine you’re walking through a store… you walk into the section where they sell watches.
On one of the shelves, you see a beautiful Rolex. It’s exactly what you’ve been looking for. You didn’t really know that, but now that you’ve seen it, WOW… that’s the one for you.
Right beside that Rolex, you see another type of watch. Except there’s no actual watch there. There’s just a sign that says something like, “We’ll make you the watch of your dreams! We’ll customize it 100% for you!”
Isn’t that exciting? Well, no, it’s not.
Because frankly, there’s nothing THERE on the shelf to make that exciting. There’s no picture in your mind to grab onto.
So you pick the Rolex and leave the store.
When it comes to selling consulting services, I was the INVISIBLE watch for years.
The value proposition was basically, “Hey! You give me a bunch of money and then we’ll make up what to do… 100% customized for you!”
That might be valuable, but it sure isn’t ATTRACTIVE.
Are you thinking you’re doing a smart thing by offering to customize everything? Do your results prove that it’s a smart thing?
Consider another direction… PRODUCTIZATION.
This is where you take a service, you give it a name, you give it a reason for being, you focus it on a RESULT, you make it into something you CAN “put on the shelf.” As clients walk by, they can see it there and say, “I want that!”
This doesn’t mean you can’t sell customized service. The point is that if you DO, the ATTRACTION needs to come from somewhere else. The Platform is a great place for that. That way, it generates the attraction towards you and you get clients appearing that say, “We want to work with you!” Selling customized stuff to clients like that is not hard. They already bought YOU a while ago, so the details are really just a formality.
But if you don’t have a platform, AND if you’re only selling 100% customized stuff, then where’s the attraction going to come from?
Selling the invisible is a hard road. As it turns out, it’s also completely unnecessary.